it, just as he did of eating and drinking and love-making and,
incidentally, architecture. He was enormously in demand, chiefly
perhaps, among young married women whose respectability and social
position were alike beyond cavil. He never carried anything too far, you
see. He was no pirate--a sort, rather, of licensed privateer. And what
made him so invincibly attractive--after you had granted his other
qualities, that is--was that he professed himself, among women,
exceedingly difficult to please, so that attentions from him, even of a
casual sort, became _ex hypothesi_ compliments of the first order. If he
asked you, in his innocently shameless way, to belong to his _hareem_,
you boasted of it afterward;--jocularly, to be sure, but you felt
pleased just the same. The thing that had given the final cachet of
distinction to Rose's social success that season, had been the fact that
he had shown a disposition to flirt with her quite furiously.

Rose didn't need to tell her husband that, of course, because he knew it
already, as he also knew that Willis had asked her to be one of the
Watteau group he was getting up for the charity ball (the ball was to
be a sumptuously picturesque affair that year), nor that he had been
spending hours with her over the question of costumes--getting as good
as he gave, too, because her eye for clothes amounted to a really
special talent.

All that Rodney didn't know, was about the conversation the two of them
had had yesterday afternoon at tea-time.

Rose, intent on telling him all about it, had postponed the recital
while she made up her own mind as to how she should regard the thing
herself; whether she ought to have been annoyed, or seriously
remonstrant, or whether the smile of pure amusement which had come so